by Ruth Rendell
“I won’t be here to see.”
Unlike Norman Batchelor’s mother and Princess Andrew of Greece, Freya wasn’t preparing to give birth on a table. Her due date was past and the hospital had started making ominous noises. That afternoon, after Rosemary had been given her tea, a scone, and a piece of carrot cake, Freya doubled up and winced. “I’m having a pain.”
“Shall I drive you to the hospital?”
“Not yet. Much too soon.”
While refusing to watch television in her bedroom, Rosemary enjoyed it on her host’s much larger set. Everything they watched she deemed immoral or called a disgrace and asked for the channel to be changed or changed it herself. She preferred programmes about birdlife or handicrafts in Cumbria or clothes for the elderly. Freya sat down and watched TV with her, getting up from time to time to walk about the flat, secretly timing her pains. At 6:00 p.m. she said to her grandmother, “We’re leaving for the hospital now, Gran. Will you be all right on your own?”
“Why the hospital? Are you ill?”
“I’m in labour. I’m about to have a baby.”
“Are you?” Rosemary looked at her, mystified. “Nobody tells me anything.”
“Will you be all right on your own? Or shall I fetch Mum?”
Rosemary didn’t reply. She went into her bedroom, heard Freya and David call out, “Bye, Gran. See you later,” and sat on the bed, thinking. She had of course brought nothing with her, had borrowed a nightdress from Judith and a blouse and skirt. These she left in a neat pile on the bedside table. Next she stripped the bed. She dressed in the clothes she had come in, checked she had her front-door key, and returned to the living-room, where the phone was ringing. Like two earlier calls, she ignored this one too. It would be Judith, whom Freya must have called in the car on one of those mobiles people had.
Out in the street, Rosemary would have taken a cab home but doubted the driver would take her all the way to Loughton. She had taken the tube here, so why not take it back again? I have changed, she thought, I am a different person from the woman who came here ten days ago. I no longer care. Caring has departed. All my life I have cared for other people, husband, children, grandchildren, friends, relatives, neighbours. Now I don’t, I only care for me. She walked along Hamilton Terrace and crossed Maida Vale, rather pleased with herself for not having a heavy bag to carry. Since her marriage, and rarely before that, she had never been into a café or restaurant on her own, not even for a cup of coffee or a sandwich. Alan had always been with her or one of her children or a friend. Outside the Café Laville she hesitated, then pushed open the door and went in.
The place would be full later, she guessed, but now only a few people were sitting at tables, all couples of course. A man came up and asked her what she wanted, and she said a cup of black coffee. He asked if she meant an Americano, and not having the faintest idea what that was, she agreed. It was easier that way. In future, she thought, she would always opt for the easy option. The coffee was quite nice. She didn’t want anything to eat. A bill came—ridiculous for a drop of coffee—but she found the precise sum in her purse, laid it on the table, and added a five-pence piece.
The tube took her to Baker Street, where she changed, as she remembered doing in reverse, for Liverpool Street. A lot of people were in the train for Loughton, commuters, and she was rather pleased for using the word appropriately. She had never been one and wouldn’t have cared to have joined their number and made this tedious trip every day. No taxis were waiting outside Loughton station. She didn’t feel like waiting for one to come, so she walked, tired by the time she reached Traps Hill.
The stripy cat was sitting outside her front door. The large, long-haired cat had a pleasant, even kindly expression. She had never before invited it in but did now. There would be no one else to welcome her home.
She was in her teens before her parents had a dog, but a cat was always in the house, never allowed to sit on armchairs or on the settee. Defiant now, even of the long dead, Rosemary lifted up the purring bundle and laid it on the sofa.
She slept better that night than she had ever done at Freya’s. Having forgotten all about Freya and her imminent delivery, in the morning she remembered without much enthusiasm or anxiety. No doubt someone would call and tell her. Someone did, at 9:00 a.m.
“Everyone’s been in a state about you,” said David. “Not me, I knew you’d be all right. Judith’s phoned all the rellies. Fenella wanted to call the police, but I don’t think she did. Incidentally, I’m a dad. Freya had a baby boy at one a.m. Three and a half kilos.”
Apart from knowing it was a measurement of weight, Rosemary hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was in pounds. She sent her love to Freya, thought about phoning Judith and decided against it, decided against phoning anyone. The stripy cat had got out of a window and was sitting on the balcony. Putting him out the front door to find his way home, she told him she had nothing for him but would buy cat food when she was out. There were no bathtubs at Freya’s, so she had a bath, luxuriating in it, then dressed in one of what Fenella had been heard to name as “Gran’s own creations” and got out her winter coat from the mothproof bag it had been in since March.
When she was in her teens and the war was over but clothing coupons were still in use, her mother didn’t take her “up to town” to buy clothes, but to Leytonstone and Bowman’s department store on the tube or to Ilford’s shops on the bus. Instead of clothes, the raw materials were what they went there for, dress lengths as they were called, or remnants, just enough fabric to make a skirt or blouse. No tee-shirts and scarcely any trousers in those days. They bought wool too, but more often, while the war was on, unpicked old garments to knit up again. Her mother had taught her to sew and, according to the teenage Judith, behaving like a typical teenager, hadn’t been much of a teacher.
Rosemary had been undeterred and was undeterred now. She went into the shop that was run by an Asian family but had once been Penistans—the teenage schoolboys who were her contemporaries had made much of that name—and went on a shopping spree. A length of green silk, the same sort of fabric as the copper-coloured silk she had made into the dress and jacket for Freya’s wedding, was her first purchase; then came a few yards of fine wool; next a few metres of tweed; and lastly some expensive blue velvet. Mumtaz, as the shop was now called, thought it was Christmas and were all smiles. Rosemary had spent a fortune. There was too much stuff, in both senses of the word, for her to carry home, and Mumtaz said they would depart from their rule and bring it to her in the van.
Back at home she was hunting through her large stack of patterns when the van arrived. Another rule was broken when Mr. Ashok carried the baskets of materials into the flat for her. Her phone was ringing and she saw that several messages had been left. Let the phone ring and let the messages sit where they were. She would sit on the floor, pin the pattern she had chosen to the blue velvet, and cut it out. While she was machining, there would be no interruptions from Alan wanting her to go out for a walk or watch TV with him or give up her work and buy a designer frock. The phone rang again. She lifted the receiver and shouted into it, “Go away.”
The blue velvet was the same colour as the cloak her mother had made her, aged seven, to wear over her dress when she went to parties. She thought about it as she cut, thought too about meeting Alan three years later. Daphne Jones, Rosemary could see now as Daphne had been then, a young witch with her crystal ball and her cards. When Alan first went off with her or went off to her, Rosemary had been shattered, devastated was the word everyone used, but that feeling hadn’t lasted. Her pride was hurt, she decided, and now she remembered what her grandmother had told her when she was little, told the whole family who were there.
“When you get old,” she had said on the occasion of her brother Tom’s dying, “you don’t have much emotion. It goes. At about seventy, I’d say. All those things and people you were passionate about, angry o
r adoring or longing, they all go, and a kind of dull calm takes over. I used to worship Tom. Now he’s dead I don’t much care. That’s how it is with me.”
Now Alan’s gone, said Rosemary to herself, I don’t much care. I did at first but now I don’t. That’s how it is with me. Calm, at peace, thinking ahead to all the clothes she would be able to make uninterruptedly, she began to pin the velvet pieces together. Tomorrow she would go to the shop which had reopened when knitting became fashionable again two or three years ago and buy enough wool to make herself a twinset. Something for the new baby too? I don’t think so. Freya wouldn’t appreciate it, so why bother?
Why do anything at all I don’t enjoy? I won’t. That’s how it is for me now.
SEVERAL PHONE CALLS were made to Daphne and Alan before Michael got an answer that wasn’t a recorded message to say they were in Italy. When he said he had given a DNA sample to the police and that Lewis had been asked for one also, Daphne said, “Come round.”
“Shall I? You’re only just back from your holiday.”
“Never mind that. We’d love to see you.”
Putting on his coat, Michael thought how she talked as if she and Alan had been together for a dozen years or more. It was cold and Daphne had lit a fire in the beautiful room—not a real fire, that wouldn’t have been permitted, but something gas-fired that looked real. Another first time for him was the kiss she gave him when he arrived. They had sherry and blini. Michael could tell the caviar was real. The sherry was in honour of George, Alan said.
“Tell all about the DNA,” said Daphne when they had raised their glasses in George’s memory.
“I told you on the phone.” Michael was diffident now he had come to the purpose of his visit. It was going to be a monstrous thing to say, so he began with Lewis. “This woman didn’t say, but I could tell she thinks the man’s hand might have belonged to Lewis’s uncle James Rayment.” He couldn’t go on without prompting.
Alan did the prompting. “And the woman’s?” He realised too late what he was asking. “No, perhaps I shouldn’t ask that.”
“You should if I’m to tell you.” Michael wanted to say that it wasn’t easy for him, then despised himself for being self-pitying. “Because the woman’s hand might be my mother’s.”
“Michael!” Daphne seemed to shrink, clasping her hands. “How terrible for you.”
“Well, yes.” The ready tears were there, waiting to fall. He swallowed hard, which sometimes helped. “That’s why my DNA. They haven’t got the results yet. Clara Moss saw them together, my mother and Rayment, I mean.” That his father had seen them was more than he could bear to say. But thinking it made the tears fall. If Daphne put her arms round him it would be too much for him and he might collapse. She didn’t. Alan passed him a beautifully laundered handkerchief, and Michael wondered incongruously if Daphne had washed and ironed it. “I’m sorry. I’m inclined to cry.”
“Is it a relief?”
“I suppose it is. I even cry when I realise they think my father put the hands there and buried them. That means my father killed them both.”
Neither Alan nor Daphne spoke.
“I may have told you, I don’t remember, but he’ll be a hundred years old in January. He’s absolutely compos mentis, the same as ever. I don’t know if either of you knew him.”
Alan shook his head, but Daphne said, “I did.”
“Of course. You lived next door.”
Alan was looking at her strangely. It seemed she had turned rather pale, but she was always pale. Michael wanted to say that his father wanted to live until his hundredth birthday, but if the police came to the conclusion Michael had already reached, wouldn’t it be better for him to die sooner? Michael wanted to say it but knew he would only cry again, so he made himself ask them about their holiday, mostly spent in Florence and Rome. That was safe, tearless territory as he had never been there. Daphne and Alan were not the kind of tourists who inflict their travel experiences on their friends, accompanied often by slides, postcards, and photographs on their mobile phones. They simply said they had had a wonderful time, mentioned a church or two, the Pyramid of Cestius, and the marvellous food. Alan said Michael should stay to supper, but Daphne said nothing, her expression suddenly shut-in and—could it be frightened?
Michael went. Daphne saw him to the front door, and if he had feared he had in some way offended her, when she kissed him again and briefly put her arms around him, he knew he was mistaken. The evening he spent in Vivien’s room, lying on the bed with his arm round his imagined wife, longing for her and for a while forgetting his father.
“WHAT’S THE MATTER?”
As soon as he had said it, Alan thought how old-fashioned that was, that no one said it anymore, or no one under sixty. They said, What’s wrong?
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” Daphne tried a smile and more or less failed. “The classic reply. No, of course there’s something wrong. You can tell, can’t you?”
He nodded.
“I don’t need to confess anything to you. I never confessed anything to my husbands. They didn’t ask so I didn’t tell.”
“I don’t ask.” He thought, She’s going to tell me she had an affair with Michael or even with Lewis Newman. “You don’t have to tell me anything.” After that, he only wanted to say one thing: “I love you.”
“I know and I love you.” She had been sitting next to him on the sofa. Their sherry glasses were empty. “Would you get me a small brandy, Alan?” She stood up and moved into one of the armchairs, not far away, just not touching him.
“I’ve never known you to drink spirits.”
“Only when it’s medicinal.” She smiled. “Michael reminded you that I lived next door to them. My parents disapproved. I mean of both of them, John and Anita. Not that we called them that. They were Mr. and Mrs. Winwood.” She took a sip of the brandy and gave a small gasp. “I knew him. He knew me. We talked over the garden fence. I was twelve, going on twenty-five.”
Instead of his turning pale, a dark flush had spread across Alan’s face. “What are you saying, Daphne?”
“He was very good-looking. That was the age of the film star, much more then than ever since. He looked like Errol Flynn. They say Errol Flynn was stupid. I don’t know. John Winwood wasn’t stupid, just insensitive, and he wasn’t charming or kind or gentle—well, he wasn’t unkind to me. He was just amazingly good-looking. You wouldn’t think a twelve-year-old could feel like I did, but I did. I wasn’t in love with him but I was madly attracted. Madly, Alan.”
His mouth was dry. “What happened?”
“We met. Quite often. Anita was out with some man. I never knew who, but it might have been with Lewis’s uncle or this soldier she knew or—well, anyone. I think she must have been quite promiscuous, though I didn’t even know the word then. We met in John’s house. It was easy, just next door. I suppose my parents thought I was out with the crowd of you, you and Rosemary and Bill Johnson and the Batchelors and Lewis and Michael. I was sometimes, but often I was with John.”
“You mean you slept with him?”
“Not exactly. Not what the expression means. No, I didn’t. We did everything except the thing people mean when they say ‘slept with.’ We didn’t do that because though I was twelve, I could have had a baby. You know what I mean. But do you know how terrified girls were then, even very, very young girls like me, of getting pregnant? Never mind, we were, I was. I think John was aware of that and he didn’t mind. He was afraid as well, of me, of my parents.”
“Why did it stop?”
“John turned us—well, you all—out of the qanats so that we could go there, he and I, use the place, I mean, instead of his house. I don’t know why not his house. Anita had gone or had died, later he said she had died. I was frightened and I said I wouldn’t see him again. I didn’t threaten him, I mean like saying I’d tel
l my parents, I never did that. I just stopped seeing him except in the street sometimes or over the garden fence. Alan, I knew something horrible had happened in that house.” Daphne raised the brandy glass to her lips and took a sip. “I missed John, I didn’t even like him, I was afraid of him, but he was afraid of me too.” She hesitated. “There’s more. Shall I go on?”
“Yes, of course. Go on.”
“That’s a particularly ghastly situation. Two people in a relationship that’s founded on mutual fear. We were enormously attracted to each other and afraid to be alone together. I did go to his house once. I went to the back door and he wouldn’t let me in. He was afraid to let me in, Alan. ‘Don’t set foot in this house,’ he said, and I ran home.
“It was a few weeks later he started a fire in the garden. I was home from school early and I saw him pour petrol on the wood he’d piled up. But it wasn’t only wood. There were two shapes in sacks—no plastic in those days. Two long shapes in sacks tied at the tops with string. I watched him out of my bedroom window. The fire burnt down and John poured paraffin on more logs and the two things in the sacks. He fetched another can of petrol. I remember thinking he must be desperate to burn whatever that was because petrol was rationed and very hard to come by. It was after that that the fire got out of hand and spread to the shed and trees and someone called the firemen, probably several people did.”
Alan said, “You never told your mother about Winwood? I mean, what Winwood had done to you?”
“I never did. You see, it wasn’t what he had done to me, it was what we did with each other. I know you’ll say I was only twelve, but I’ve explained that. I was old for my age, years older.”
“And now you are young for your age.”
She smiled. “Well, perhaps. You’ve seen what was in the papers and on television about those celebs raping young girls and assaulting them. Some of them told their parents and they weren’t believed. I knew I wouldn’t be believed, and what would I have said? That I’d had sex—well, sort of sex—with the man next door? And say as well that I enjoyed it? I don’t think so.”